T is for...Tension
Tension is the sense of drama and suspense which makes your story interesting. It has elements of excitement and compression and its function is to sustain your reader's curiosity. Your story must have some innate drama to make it interesting in the first place; how you handle the tension will dictate whether your reader keeps turning the pages until way past bedtime or discards the book in favour of something else.
Maintaining narrative tension is rather like knitting -- you need to keep the thread pulled tight otherwise holes will start to appear and the whole thing might unravel. Every scene should have a function that helps to move the narrative along -- use the editing process to cut any which are superfluous - and each one should be economically written. The delicate skein of your story will not be able to support the weight of too many words.
To maintain tension you may need to change yarns occasionally - cut away from a climactic moment of drama to something totally different, so that your reader has to keep going in order to find out what happens next. In the same vein, altering the mood of scenes, contrasting something heart-rending with something lighter and more humourous, creates an internal dynamism which will stop your narrative from falling flat.
Tension exists at the micro as well as the macro level: cut the dead wood out of every sentence, every paragraph, so that your prose is concentrated and well sprung; remember to vary the length of your sentences, too. Short ones carry more tension.
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